111: Chapter 112 The Poor Man's Calculation

When Li Cang broke the last nutrition block into three pieces, the third piece slipped through his fingers, bounced onto the table, rolled half a turn, and stopped at the edge of the operation pod's main screen projection, illuminated by the blue light like a small grey pebble.

He looked at that piece of nutrition block for two seconds and decided to pick it up later, swallowing the two pieces in his mouth first. The life support system's drugs had already suppressed his sense of taste to only two settings: "hard" and "not so hard." The act of chewing itself was purely to prevent the sharp edges from making his esophagus bleed.

A notification popped up in the top right corner of the screen while he was struggling with that piece of nutrition block, using his tongue to push it onto his molars to grind it. It wouldn't budge. He gave up and swallowed the whole thing; his Adam's apple bobbed once, and the block scraped him so hard he bared his teeth in a grimace.

Battle report. Issued by C-19.

He clicked it open and looked at the casualty column first.

Three minor injuries, zero KIA.

He leaned back against the chair, the back of his head hitting the headrest with a dull thud, and his shoulders slumped slightly. This movement wasn't intentional; his body had simply relaxed on its own.

It was as if a string that had been pulled taut was suddenly cut, loosening from his neck all the way down to his lumbar spine. He even felt the air in the operation pod become a little lighter.

Three modified six-legged walking vehicles destroyed, twenty-three enemy armed guards eliminated, forty-seven technicians and two managers captured, and factory equipment fully seized.

"Beautiful," he said a single word to the air, then scrolled down.

The seizure list was seventeen pages long. He didn't skip any, going through them page by page. It wasn't because he liked looking at numbers, but because he was poor. When a poor person looks at an income statement, they have to personally examine every line, just like counting money; missing even one line feels like a loss.

The first page was large equipment: lathes, welding tables, CNC cutting machines—standard metal processing equipment. Usable. Good.

The second page was raw material inventory: forty-two tons of refined steel. He paused at this number. Forty-two tons was enough to bring the power armor integrity rate of C-19 Squadron from seventy percent back to ninety-five percent, with leftovers.

This was hard currency, one of the things he lacked most at the moment. He almost wanted to bow to the screen in gratitude for Lady Kara's generous gift.

Eighteen tons of aluminum alloy, six hundred meters of copper cable, three thousand liters of hydraulic oil—all good things. He scrolled a bit faster, the corners of his mouth curling up uncontrollably.

Pages three to five were semi-finished parts and weapon components. The models all matched the reverse engineering database, and the procurement quantities aligned with production records. The parts consumption for six finished products plus the remaining inventory fit perfectly. Normal, very normal.

Page six.

The last seven lines.

The model types changed.

He flipped back to page five for a look, then back to page six to confirm he hadn't misread the lines. He then copied these seven model numbers and entered them into the universal parts database. After waiting two seconds, three matching results popped up.

High-temperature pressure-resistant seals, rated working temperature twelve hundred degrees, for use in nuclear reactor cooling systems.

Superconducting coil frames, niobium-titanium alloy, for use in particle accelerators.

Neutron shielding plates, boron carbide-lead composite, for use in nuclear facility radiation protection.

His shoulders tensed back up. The string that had just loosened was reconnected, tighter than before, stretching from his lumbar spine all the way to the back of his head. He unconsciously leaned his body forward, closer to the screen, as if being closer could turn these three lines of text into something else less terrifying.

Forty seals, twelve sets of superconducting coil frames, eighty neutron shielding plates.

This wasn't sample quantity; this was construction quantity.

"Well," he said softly, "and I thought we'd won."

He marked the remaining four unmatched models in red and saved them in the pending analysis queue. Then he closed the list and opened the resource panel. He did this very slowly, as if he didn't really want to see the numbers inside but had to—the same feeling a person drowning in debt has when checking their bank balance.

GP balance.

He looked.

Then he pulled up the daily maintenance consumption for the Thunder Warriors. genetic collapse wasn't something that stopped just because it was frozen; it was a countdown written into the cells.

Money was burning every day. The T3 Status maintenance cost for C-19 was three times that of ordinary Thunder Warriors, and Arik's hero unit maintenance was another expense. He lined these numbers up, subtracted this month's budget, subtracted base operations, and subtracted ammunition replenishment.

Remaining disposable GP.

He stared at that number for five seconds and then smiled—not a happy smile, but the kind of "I knew it" smile. Poor people always have a weird foresight about their own poverty; they already know it's not enough before they see the specific numbers, and seeing them instead brings a sort of "as expected" calm.

Not enough. Not enough to handle a nuclear facility-level threat; it was barely enough to conduct a single complete battlefield reconnaissance.

He kept the resource panel pinned to the right side of the screen and opened the system asset evaluation version of the seized items. Two modified six-legged walking vehicle wrecks, marked by the system as available for reverse engineering, with an estimated output of one to two medium-quality tech plug-ins.

He stared at these two lines, tapped his fingers on the table three times, and then opened the Adeptus Mechanicus contact channel.

The alliance had already been established, and the Tech-Priests were over at the base helping to upgrade facilities. What they wanted was very clear: technical samples, unknown technology wrecks, anything that could be dismantled and studied. Their hunger for knowledge was about the same as his hunger for GP, the difference being they wrote this hunger into their dogma and felt quite honored by it.

Two wrecks, and forty-seven technical workers who knew every screw of these walking vehicles.

He began drafting an asset transfer list.

Two walking vehicle wrecks, accompanied by forty-seven technical workers including complete oral records of operation experience and assembly procedures, to be submitted as priority samples for the technical cooperation project to the Adeptus Mechanicus Tech-Priest team.

Request for a preliminary reverse engineering report within seventy-two hours, with all technical parameters open to the Imperial side simultaneously. Priority analysis items are the thermal weapon focusing system and the gait control module.

He submitted the list, and the system popped up a confirmation: Asset transfer request sent.

The GP balance didn't change. Wrecks and prisoners were seized goods; transferring them to the alliance side was a diplomatic action and did not consume GP.

He had just used zero cost to gain three things: the reverse engineering speed was shortened from four weeks to under one week, the maintenance cost of forty-seven prisoners was transferred to the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the Adeptus Mechanicus now owed him a decent-sized favor.

Three gains, zero cost. He reached out to pick up the piece of nutrition block that had fallen on the table and popped it into his mouth. This time he chewed more briskly; when in a good mood, even a nutrition block didn't taste so bad.

But after two chews, he stopped because he had switched to the Global Civilization Situation Map. The Imperial control zone boundary in Terra's northern hemisphere had pushed outward by nearly two hundred kilometers over the past three months, and two Sun Warriors factories had already become grey ruin markers.

But in the unexplored areas beyond the boundary, the Facility Three was hidden in some corner he couldn't see, and his current strength wasn't enough to strike a nuclear facility-level target.

He needed more resources.

Resources wouldn't fall from the sky; they had to be seized.

He zoomed the situation map to its maximum scale and began scanning sector by sector. He wasn't looking for the Facility Three—that was the intelligence department's job. He was looking for something else; he was looking for which direction on this map had the weakest enemy forces and the richest resources, most suitable for launching a blitzkrieg.

The bottom right corner of the screen flickered.

A system notification he hadn't noticed before had popped up at some point, mostly hidden by the resource panel he had pinned on the right. He dragged the resource panel to the left, and the full text of the notification was revealed.

Evolution Phase PVP Matching Pool status updated. Countdown to the next matching window opening.

He looked at the countdown numbers, forgetting to chew the nutrition block in his mouth; he just held it there, hard and pressing against his cheek.

Seventy-two hours.

The same time as the Adeptus Mechanicus's reverse engineering report.

He swallowed the nutrition block, again doing so dry, which caused a dull pain in his esophagus, but he didn't notice because his mind was already racing.